Sleep-Deprived People Are More Likely to Cheat

Good managers focus not only on bottom-line performance, but on the means by which their people achieve that high performance. Unethical behaviors can be damaging to a broad variety of stakeholders, and are often the cause of organizational crises. Ethical behavior not only keeps consciences clean; it can boost the reputation and performance of your firm. More than ever, ethics must be a primary management concern.

A common opinion is that the way to avoid ethical lapses is to figure out how to hire good people. Good people do good things and bad people do bad things: it’s as simple as that. However, the behavioral ethics literature indicates that this is simply not the case; like Dr. Jekyll, we all have a Mr. Hyde lurking within. The real question is how often we behave as Dr. Jekyll and how often we behave as Mr. Hyde.

Lack of sleep robs the fuel for self-control from the region of the brain responsible for self-control, whereas sleep restores it.

The workplace has many temptations that employees must resist, from the petty impulse to claim credit for someone else’s work, to the unscrupulous lapse of lying in a negotiation context, to the criminal act of misreporting financial numbers. Recent research indicates that self-control is a key determinant of whether or not people fall to or resist such temptations. When their ability to exert self-control is high, they can resist. When it is low, they cave.

As the Jekyll and Hyde analogy suggests, self-control varies over time within the same person. Physiologically, self-control occurs largely in the pre-frontal cortex region of the human brain, and uses glucose as a fuel. The act of using self-control draws upon this fuel, which exhausts the fuel. Thus, one’s ability to exert self-control can become depleted. And when self-control is depleted, people are more likely to cave to temptations to behave unethically.

Recent research indicates that sleep deprivation drains glucose in the prefrontal cortex. In other words, a lack of sleep robs the fuel for self-control from the region of the brain responsible for self-control, whereas sleep restores it.

Building from this research, my colleagues and I investigated the effects of sleep on unethical behavior. Across a set of four studies in both laboratory and field contexts, we found that a lack of sleep led to high levels of unethical behavior. Moreover, we found that this was because a lack of sleep depleted self-control, which in turn led to unethical behavior.

It is important to underscore about this research that it was small amounts of lost sleep that produced noticeable effects on unethical behavior. For example, in one of the laboratory studies my colleagues and I conducted, there was a difference of only about 22 minutes of sleep between those who cheated and those who did not. In the field studies, naturally occurring variation in sleep (with most nights ranging from 6.5-8.5 hours of sleep) was sufficient to predict unethical behavior at work the next day.

Other researchers have found that a lack of sleep leads to deviant behavior at work, similarly because of decrements in self-control. They found that similarly small amounts of sleep matter; those who slept six hours or less were more likely to engage in deviant work behaviors than those who slept more than six hours. Many of the deviant work behaviors they examined, such as falsifying receipts, would also be considered unethical behavior. Thus, their research findings support the idea that sleep is crucial for ethics in the workplace.

Unfortunately, employees have many demands on their time that compete with sleep, with sleep too often the activity that loses out. Indeed, almost the 30% of Americans get less than six hours of sleep per night, and sleep levels have been trending downward for decades.

This growing health crisis may very well have the side effect of creating an ethics crisis as well. And often, it is the people who are in the most important or most influential jobs in a given firm who are most sleep deprived. Consider that, in contrast to the 30% of Americans in general who get less than six hours of sleep, over 40% of managers sleep less than six hours per night. Thus, people entrusted with the most consequential decisions, and given most leeway to exercise judgment, are in demanding roles that cut into their sleep, which depletes their self-control and leaves them vulnerable to caving to temptations to behave unethically.

How can we address the problem of sleep deficits and the unethical behavior they promote? Organizations need to give sleep more respect. Executives and managers should keep in mind that the more they push employees to work late, come to the office early, and answer emails and calls at all hours, the more they invite unethical behavior to creep in. Because leaders help to set norms by modeling behaviors, my recommendation is to prioritize sleep in your own life, while encouraging your team to do the same. Do what you can to support employees’ sleep health rather than disrupt it. The better rested we all are, the less likely the Mr. Hyde in any of us will come to define us.